Virtual and overlay network technology has significantly improved the information technology (IT) industry in terms of efficiency, cost, and processing power. Virtual and overlay network technology enables applications or services to operate in a virtual environment. For instance, several operating systems may operate in parallel using multiple virtual environments associated to a single central processing unit (CPU). Performing applications or services in parallel not only reduces overhead costs, but increases processing power. Additionally, virtual and overlay network technology may centralize administrative tasks while improving scalability and overall hardware-resource utilization. Virtual resources, such as computational, storage, or network elements may be redistributed or moved while applications and services are operating in the virtual environment. As a result, virtual and overlay network technology is central to the overall trend in creating IT environments that are able to manage themselves.
Many businesses and enterprises may utilize virtual and overlay network technology by purchasing virtual private network (VPN) services from a network service provider. VPN services, such as Layer 2 VPN (L2VPN) and Layer 3 VPN (L3VPN), offer secure and logically dedicated connectivity among multiple client sites. VPN services may use border gateway protocol (BGP) to establish connections between inter-connected different autonomous systems (ASs), such as the different client sites, to exchange routing information. When a BGP peer receives routes from a BGP peer in a different autonomous system over an external BGP (eBGP) connection, the BGP peer will generally redistributed the received routes to all internal BGP (iBGP) peers within the same AS or client site over iBGP connections or via an iBGP peer that acts as an route reflector. eBGP peers may be BGP peers that may use an eBGP connection to communicate route information, while iBGP peers may be BGP peers that use an iBGP connection to communicate route information.
BGP may also redistribute and exchange multiprotocol information using multiprotocol extensions as which may be denoted as Multiprotocol Extensions for BGP-4 as defined in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 4760, which is incorporated herein as if reproduced by its entirety. For example, the BGP multiprotocol extension can be used to exchange private network information among multiple sites. BGP multiprotocol extensions may currently include prefixes for: Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 (IPv4), IP version 6 (IPv6), multiprotocol label switching (MPLS), L3VPN, MPLS L2VPN, tunnel endpoints, Address-Based Outbound Router Filters, and flow specifications. BGP multi-protocol extensions may be designed to be able to add additional multi-protocol features either for private usage or as standardized well-known BGP features. Moreover, BGP may pass in-band operational status messages, such as advisory messages, operational message, and socialite message. Hence, BGP may be flexible and may be used for a variety of virtual networks.
The client may want to connect the private network that utilizes BGP to a data center (DC). The DC may house servers and other telecommunication equipment to provide network functionality, computational resources, and data storage. In an attempt to reduce network overhead costs and/or to increase network capacity and performance, a client may elect to subscribe to data center services from a data center service provider. By subscribing to the data center services, the client may be able to offload some of the dedicated client data center operations to the data center service provider. A data center service provider may offer client data center services through a virtual data center (vDC). The client may require connecting the specific vDC to the client's private network formed through the VPN services provided by the network service provider. A vDC may also utilize the VPN technology that utilizes BGP to interconnect virtual or physical computational resources, storage resources, and network alliance together for a client. In this case, eBGP may be used between vDC and a WAN VPN, where the DC network belongs to one AS and WAN network belongs to another AS.
To connect the specific virtual data center to the client's private network, the network service provider may need to extend VPN services to the data center service provider locations. Currently, extending VPN services from the network provider to the data center service provider requires manual configurations between the client and data center service provider, and between the network service provider and data center service provider. Unfortunately, the configuration process is time consuming and prone to error because of the multiple interfaces that need to be manually configured and the coordination between the two service providers and the client. Additionally, BGP has not been configured to automatically perform the manual configurations. Therefore, additional advances in BGP are necessary to automatically provision and configure the virtual data centers with private networks to reduce configuration complexity and improve configuration efficiency.